Comments on: So Much for the Republican Party Being in Its Death Throeshttps://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/02/20/so-much-for-the-republican-party-being-in-its-death-throes/
Mon, 19 Mar 2018 12:47:28 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.4By: Cassidyhttps://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/02/20/so-much-for-the-republican-party-being-in-its-death-throes/#comment-4232807
Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:21:50 +0000http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=125949#comment-4232807@NR: It’s late and I missed this, but I don’t think you caught the sarcasm. You’re full of shit and don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Sorry I wasn’t more clear earlier.
]]>By: Ken_Lhttps://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/02/20/so-much-for-the-republican-party-being-in-its-death-throes/#comment-4231957
Thu, 21 Feb 2013 02:58:28 +0000http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=125949#comment-4231957As an observer from Australia who loathes the US right and all it stands for, let me join in deploring the complacency I read in so many places on the part of Democratic Party supporters. Often from the same people who were shitting themselves a few months ago because they convinced themselves Romney would win and the GOP might take the senate.

The Labor Party is the ideological equivalent of the Democratic Party in Australia. In 2007 they had such a thumping win that earnest pundits predicted the conservatives would never win another election, giving the same kinds of plausible (evidence-free) arguments that I read now in America.

The conservatives have won almost every state election since, and are at unbackable odds to win power federally later this year. Two party systems simply don’t allow permanent dominance by one side, no matter how persuasive the arguments that one party is doomed.

New Jersey is one of the eighteen states that have gone Democratic in each of the last six presidential elections. Missouri, Arkansas, and Kentucky have each gone Republican in each of the last four.

]]>By: Jose Padillahttps://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/02/20/so-much-for-the-republican-party-being-in-its-death-throes/#comment-4231532
Wed, 20 Feb 2013 23:45:27 +0000http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=125949#comment-4231532NJ is hardly the most Democratic state around. Off the top of my head I would say MASS, NY, RI, Vermont, Maryland, Hawaii, DEL and CAL vote more Democratic. NJ is more like Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, states that Hilary Clinton could easily take, head up against Christie. Also, too, the country is not going to elect a morbidly obese guy president. Just saying.

I stopped at 72 percent because I had replenished more than enough energy for the miles I intended to drive the next day before fully recharging on my way back to New York. In Norwich, I charged for an hour on the lower-power charger, expressly on the instructions of Tesla personnel, to get enough range to reach the Supercharger station in Milford.

If the Tesla people on the phone were telling him one thing and the car was telling him something else, why on earth did he pay more attention to the people on the phone than he did to the actual instruments inside the actual car?

Sorry, but the guy is an idiot. If tech support tells you to ignore all of the warning messages you’re getting from your computer about an imminent shutdown, do you obey them without saying, “Hey, guys, this isn’t responding the way you said it would”?

ETA: I also love how he defends his only charging to 72% as that was all I thought I would need! Doesn’t the fact that you subsequently ran out of juice mean that you made a bad judgement call when you decided you only needed that much and didn’t need to charge to 100 percent as you had been advised to do?

Well, oozings from festering warts or not, most of the posters on that dKos diary agree with you for the most part: The utility of EV’s for “commuter” applications isn’t much of an issue: the Big Deal with Broder’s NYT road-trip review was its exposure of the shortcomings of electric cars for long-distance driving. Which issues, despite the eventual improvements you (and the Kossacks) foresee will be coming, are still with us.

Case in point, my 92 year old Father and soon to be 90 year old Mother. Dems all their life and raised four kids who are also Dems. However, there is a lot of data to suggest that those young first, second and third time voters are liberal by a greater margin than older voters. Democrats are literally gaining several million potential voters each year over Republicans. As I said upthread, the challange is getting them engaged, registered and to the polls in 2014.

the reviewer treated a piece of new technology as if it was the same as the existing technology

Agreed, but you are perhaps being too kind on the reviewer, who was not naive, but went out of his way to look for (cause?) problems.

Mnemosyne’s post #131 nails what seems to me to be the most damning point in that horribly skewed review.

]]>By: MattRhttps://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/02/20/so-much-for-the-republican-party-being-in-its-death-throes/#comment-4231269
Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:22:46 +0000http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=125949#comment-4231269@Mandalay: I am still amazed that the New York Times printed a review that was largely based on problems that popped up because the reviewer treated a piece of new technology as if it was the same as the existing technology. It is like writing an article reviewing a microwave oven in the 1980’s and complaining that there was a fire after you covered your dish with aluminum foil (like you always did when putting something in a conventional oven)
]]>By: Chrishttps://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/02/20/so-much-for-the-republican-party-being-in-its-death-throes/#comment-4231256
Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:16:03 +0000http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=125949#comment-4231256@gene108:

He lacks a southern drawl and has enough sense to say “rape bad” in public.

Everything he’s done, from rescinding the millionaire’s tax and offsetting the lost revenue by gutting education funding to opposing same-sex marriage, kicking people off of Medicare, slashing salaries* and benefits for state workers and the list goes on, is just as rabidly right-wing as Corbett, Snyder, Walker, Jindal, etc.

He has the benefit of a Democratic legislature to roll back his overreach, otherwise I’m sure we’d have voter ID laws, transvaginal ultrasounds, union busting and whatever other damage Republicans can do.

*I know someone, who works in social services. His job requires a master’s degree. He has one in divinity. He got 30% paycut because the state decided the master’s had to be in social work. I know several people, with experience, who’ve been kept out of social services jobs, because they lack the required degree, despite having experience in the field and given the crap wages those jobs pay, good luck hiring college grads. It’s just a back door way to “starve the beast” and show government doesn’t work.

]]>By: rda909https://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/02/20/so-much-for-the-republican-party-being-in-its-death-throes/#comment-4231208
Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:50:50 +0000http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=125949#comment-4231208@Jay C: I don’t read that festering wart of a web site oozing of insane, racist Obama-hate while they claim to be “the base,” but I do know EVs are already “there” as a commuter car, and that a lot of the hassle in doing long distance driving is being fixed rapidly. A guy recently drove a 5,000 mile trip around America in his Model S and said it worked fairly well with a little planning:http://www.plugincars.com/resp.....+RSS+Feed)

It took decades for gas-powered vehicle technology and infrastructure development before cross country/long distance driving became somewhat comfortable, and considering EV tech is fairly new and the infrastructure really, really new, and growing very rapidly across America and the world, electric cars have clearly arrived, and are only going to get better each year.